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Kiesling, who was serving as political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens, played a noteworthy role in strengthening opposition to war against Iraq. His resignation letter to his boss Colin Powell, a searing indictment of Bush Administration policies, was published by the New York Times, and pasted into e-mails that flew around the US foreign policy establishment, the US press and the world.

A twenty-year veteran of the US Foreign Service, Kiesling is a charter member of the Coalition of the Rational, an embryonic idea to bring a broad, transpartisan group of concerned citizens together to mobilize Americans in informed opposition to the Bush Administration’s undermining of US security in our name. (Click here for more on the Coalition.)

And read last week’s riveting Washington Postportrait of Kiesling by veteran investigative reporter Bob Thompson in the newspaper’s (undervalued) Sunday magazine for more on how and why the extremism of the Bush foreign-policy agenda drove Kiesling out of government. Kiesling also offers valuable insights into the current postwar disaster.

The chaos of postwar Iraq, Kiesling argues, was easily predictable, and there’s no guarantee that what comes out of it will serve US interests. As Thompson writes, “the idea that the war will produce American-style democracy in the Middle East seems to him [Kiesling] the equivalent of dynamite fishing: You toss explosives in a pond and hope the right thing floats to the surface. As for Iraqi’s elusive weapons of mass destruction, Kiesling says, even if they are found, it’s now clear that the intelligence on which we based our attack was worthless. This is no small problem.”

‘If you’re going to talk about preemption or preventive war,’ Kiesling explains, ‘you have to have some standard, some threshold of action.’ If preemptors don’t care about that, the precedent is ‘terrifying.'”